Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

 

Secretary King: Strong civics education helps prepare students to tackle inequity

Alyson Klein, Education Week

More and better civics education helps kids become the type of citizens who will work against inequality in their communities that impact things like law enforcement, U.S. Secretary of Education John B. King, Jr. said at the National Press Club Wednesday. Overall, schools and colleges should take preparing students to be citizens as seriously as they take getting them ready for post-secondary education, and the workplace, King said. Voting is obviously a key part of that, said King, a former social studies teacher. But it doesn’t stop there, he stressed. Students need to understand American history, the Constitution, and how government works at all levels, according to King. And they need to be able to inform themselves and understand the issues of the day, and be encouraged to volunteer in their communities.

 

 

Best practices in teacher recruitment: Preliminary review

Hanover Research, California County Superintendents Educational Services Association

In this report, Hanover Research discusses best practices in teacher recruitment at the state and local levels. The state of California is currently experiencing a teacher shortage, particularly in critical subject areas (e.g., mathematics, science, special education) and in high-need schools. Moreover, some experts believe the state will “remain at elevated levels of teacher demand for the foreseeable future.”

 

 

The best argument for hiring diverse teachers is that kids like them best

Chris Weller, Business Insider

Hua-Yu Sebastian Cherng was 16 years old when his 11th-grade English teacher made him give a presentation about “The Joy Luck Club,” a book about four Chinese immigrant families in San Francisco. The whole class was reading the novel, but Cherng’s teacher asked him to reflect on how the book related to his own experiences. He remembers her saying, “this is a story of your people.” But Cherng’s parents were from Taiwan and had immigrated years before most of the book took place. It was not at all a story of his people.

 

 

Language, Culture, and Power

 

2,000 Seattle teachers wear ‘Black Lives Matter’ shirts to class

Paige Cornwell, The Seattle Times

About 2,000 Seattle educators wore Black Lives Matter shirts at their schools Wednesday to call for racial equity in education. Schools across the district held “Black Lives Matter at School” rallies before classes began for the day. Students, parents and teachers also wore stickers and buttons emblazoned with the “Black Lives Matter” slogan. The purpose of the day was to affirm that “black lives matter in the public schools,” according to organizers, who are members of Social Equality Educators, a group of educators within the Seattle teachers union. Teachers also wanted to show their support for John Muir Elementary, which had its “Black Men Uniting to Change the Narrative” event canceled last month after receiving a threat over teachers’ plans to wear Black Lives Matter shirts.

 

 

The right to remain a student: How California school policies fail to protect and serve

Linnea Nelson, Victor Leung, and Jessica Cobb, ACLU

The ACLU of California (ACLU) is one of the first organizations to analyze recently-released data from the U.S. Department of Education Civil Rights Data Collection for the 2013-2014 school year. In that dataset, California K-12 schools reported 22,746 student referrals to police and 9,540 student arrests. We uncovered troubling statistics showing that these police interactions disproportionately affect students of color, students with disabilities, and low-income students.

 

 

Some say computer coding is a foreign language

Gaby Galvin, U.S. News

As computer coding has become an increasingly sought-after skill, more K-12 schools are working it into their curriculums. Some states have considered allowing students to forgo foreign language for coding classes, despite opposition from educators. There’s a debate over whether it’s appropriate to teach coding in elementary schools, with fierce opinions on each side. When it comes to allowing coding to fill foreign language requirements, though, most educators agree: Coding should be added to curriculums, but not at the expense of foreign language classes.

 

 

Whole Children and Strong Communities

 

More than half of U.S. kids don’t get dental sealants, and the CDC wants schools to change that

Karen Kaplan, Los Angeles Times

How can elementary schools save nearly $50 per student? By bringing in dental professionals to put sealants on their molars, federal health officials said Tuesday. If that doesn’t sound like an education-related problem, consider this: Cavities that go untreated cause kids to do worse in school.

 

 

The new focus on children’s mental health

Emily Goldberg, The Atlantic

Across the United States, up to one in five children suffers from a mental disorder in a given year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This equates to more than 17 million young people who meet criteria for disorders that affect their ability to learn, behave, and express their emotions. Giving children access to mental-health resources early in their education, however, can play a key role in mitigating negative consequences later in life, said David Anderson, the senior director of the ADHD and Behavior Disorders Center at the Child Mind Institute.

 

 

Sixth grade camp: 70 years of nature, human and otherwise, at Cuyamaca

Peter Rowe, The San Diego Union-Tribune

Sixth-grader Josh Zientek literally immersed himself in a cutting-edge educational tool: a tub of mud. “Get your hands in there and mix it up,” Sharyl Massey, an instructor, told a gaggle of 12- and 13-year-olds gathered in a greenhouse. They were preparing soil for milkweed seeds that some day will sprout and nourish flocks of migrating Monarch butterflies.

For 70 years, Cuyamaca Outdoor School — better known as sixth grade camp — has specialized in such hands-on, low-tech assignments. Even today there’s a decided lack of laptops or iPads, but few seem to mind.

 

 

Access, Assessment, and Advancement

 

 

California attorney general calls for state actions to improve student attendance

Jane Meredith Adams, EdSource

California Attorney General Kamala Harris on Wednesday called for the California Department of Education to take over a job that her office has done for the past four years:  release an annual data analysis on chronic student absenteeism. The request came as part of a 10-point call for action included in her office’s latest attendance report, In School + On Track 2016. Harris said that, beginning as early as preschool, chronic absenteeism has emerged as an indicator of whether students will be able to read at grade level in 3rd grade. That, in turn, is a predictor of graduating from high school, obtaining employment, paying taxes and staying out of prison.

The cost of being first

Melissa Scholes Young, The Atlantic

When Chris was accepted into the Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, he didn’t think of himself as a first-generation college student. Acknowledging his first-generation identity and how it influenced his path came years later, but the label assigned by his college is only a part of Chris’s individual story. His parents, both Vietnamese refugees who had not gone to college, raised him in south Florida. Chris, who did not want to use his last name, knew he’d earned a golden admission ticket, but he didn’t know that getting in was only half the struggle. He hadn’t considered how his parents’ lack of higher education might influence his own college studies.

 

 

What the lottery can tell us about college affordability

Dylan Matthews, Vox

If you asked the average person why people don’t go to college, their first answer would almost certainly be, “They can’t afford it.” It’s a fair point: Tuition really has been going up rapidly, much faster than inflation or even the cost of health care

. And the proposals of Democratic politicians like Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders to eliminate tuition for some or all students have spread the message that the high cost of college is the main factor keeping high school graduates from going — or, if they already go (as the vast majority do), from graduating.

There’s considerable evidence that cheaper tuition would help expand access to college; when Scotland got rid of college fees, applications spiked, and when the Buffett Foundation randomly granted college aid to Nebraska high schoolers, it found that those getting aid were more likely to go to four-year colleges and less likely to drop out. But a new paper complicates this picture somewhat.

 

 

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

 

Lawsuit: Amid Water Crisis, Flint Schools Fail to Meet Needs of Special Ed. Students

Evie Blad, Education Week

In the midst of a lead crisis that threatens the health and well-being of children in Flint, Mich., state and local education officials have not done enough to identify children in need of special education services and to provide those services to qualifying students, a federal lawsuit alleges.

The suit, filed by the Education Law Center and the ACLU of Michigan on behalf of 15 Flint students and their families, says that defendants—the Michigan Department of Education, Flint Community Schools, and the Genesee Intermediate School District—have committed violations of federal civil rights laws, including the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, through an alleged improper handling of special education services. Plaintiffs seek class-action status.

 

 

Proposition 13: Mad as hell

Retro Report, The New York Times

In the 1970’s, rising property taxes started a revolt in California. “Proposition 13. That’s what it was called. And it could take its place alongside ‘No taxation without representation.’” California’s young governor and other officials tried to stop it. “I must say that the proposed initiative will do nothing short of destroy education in California as we know it.” But there was no stopping the man who led it.

 

 

These states are spending less on education now than before the Great Recession

Emma Brown, The Washington Post

When the Great Recession hit, states trimmed — and in some cases slashed — their budgets for public services, including for education. As the recession ended and the economy improved, some states began restoring funds to schools. But by 2014, 35 states were still spending less per student than they did in 2008, before the recession took hold, according to a report released Thursday. Data for total state education spending in the current school year isn’t yet available. But looking just at general (or “formula”) funding, which comprises the bulk of education spending in most states, 23 states are continuing to spend less per student in the 2016-2017 school year than they were in 2008, according to the report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a left-leaning think tank.

 

 

Public Schools and Private $

 

 

LA Unified rarely rejects renewal requests from charter schools. Last night, they did 5 times.

Kyle Stokes, KPCC

Every few years, a charter school has to ask the school district overseeing it to renew its operating authority — like a renter asking to renew his lease on an apartment or a car. The Los Angeles Unified School Board has routinely approved these charter renewals. They’ve also regularly green-lighted “material revisions” to charters, allowing schools to add grade levels, alter enrollment targets or change their operational structures. Out of 202 such requests to L.A. Unified since 2011, the board has rejected only five. Tuesday night was different.

Huntington Park leaders votes to ban new charter schools for a year

Sonali Kohli, Los Angeles Times

The small, densely populated city of Huntington Park is peppered with schools, about two dozen in 3 square miles. At least 10 are charters, and city leaders contend they’re bringing in unwanted traffic. Their solution is to try to ban new charter schools. Huntington Park City Council members voted 4 to 1 late Tuesday to extend a moratorium on new charter schools until September 2017.

Other News of Note

 

21 Nigerian schoolgirls released by Boko Haram will receive medical treatment, trauma counseling

Robyn Dixon and Aminu Abubakar, Los Angeles Times

Twenty-one of the 218 missing Nigerian schoolgirls abducted in 2014 by Boko Haram militants were released Thursday as a result of negotiations with the extremist group, government officials said. The girls were released in northern Borno State, rescued by a military helicopter and transported to the state capital, Maiduguri, said Mallam Garba Shehu, spokesman for President Muhammadu Buhari. Officials said the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Swiss government acted as neutral intermediaries leading to the first major breakthrough since the girls’ kidnapping in April 2014.

 

 

Just News from Center X is produced weekly by Leah Bueso, Anthony Berryman, Beth Happel, and John Rogers. Generous support from the Stuart Foundation allows Center X to provide this service free to the general public.